The WWE Hidden Gems section of WWE Network’s on-demand library is one of the more reliably enjoyable things that the promotion offers, a weekly release of unseen or rarely seen footage from their vast archives that offers a compelling look at weird days gone by in the sport. Not every week is a home run, and there…

A couple weeks ago at an independent wrestling show in New York City, the promoter, Jac Sabboth, arrived with a treasure trove of old magazines. Sabboth also owns a pro wrestling memorabilia store, but even bearing that in mind the selection was startlingly eclectic, from the most popular magazines from the 1970s and…

Baseball consensus holds that umpires only get noticed when they make a bad call. Steve Fields’ career as a major league ump was bookended by two calls that put him in the spotlight. But he went to his grave insisting both were right.

The Rememberer’s art is, for the most part, a lonely one. That is kind of portentous and serious-sounding, but it also seemed like a better way to begin this post than the thought it was intended to convey, which is “if you are someone who remembers a lot of rando middle reliever dudes from your youth, it’s probably…

If he hadn’t out-pitched Justin Verlander and completely baffled the defending world champions for seven innings on Sunday Night Baseball last week, there is a decent chance that Bartolo Colon might not have started another game for the Texas Rangers. The pitcher whose spot Colon filled last Sunday is now healthy,…

The late-model Washington Wizards are broadly competent, secretly mediocre, spotty, and more boring than they are not. They could be nutshelled as an equal and opposite reaction to their counterparts of a decade ago. Those Wiz teams, which weren’t better but sure were stranger, boasted a bigger collection of…

Loyola-Chicago punched its ticket to the Final Four on Saturday by handing out its first decisive ass-kicking of the tournament after all those heart-stopping wins. If you saw them thrash Kansas State, 78-62—or if you’d seen them eke out one win after another en route to the Elite Eight—you know the Ramblers are for…

The Roman Empire in the west fell for a great many reasons. We could cite a lengthy series of breakdowns in its political structures, feckless leadership by a series of child-emperors and self-interested court officials, and aggressive and opportunistic barbarian groups. As the Empire fell apart, the whole Roman world…

The darkest day in NFL history began with several Philadelphia Eagles players arriving at Veterans Stadium at midnight, some 13 hours before the scheduled kickoff of a game against the Chicago Bears. They weren’t there to play; they were there precisely not to play. More specifically, they were there to stand sentry…

The story of professional sports is, among other things, the story of cheap bastard owners doing cheap bastard things. Charlie Comiskey charged his White Sox players to launder their uniforms. Jeffrey Loria coldly auctioned off two World Series champions, sold the Marlins for more than a billion dollars, and probably…

You may never hear from Mo'ne Davis again. But even so, she and her teammates have already accomplished something amazing: They've taken back the name "Taney" from history's shit list. In a wonderful stroke of ironic resonance, the name that now evokes a mixed-race, inner-city little league team that made a lot of…

Thirty years ago this spring, Bob Irsay, the prototypical bad sports owner and an obstreperous public drunk, moved his Baltimore Colts to Indianapolis. His son, Jim Irsay, the current Colts boss, has sucked the fun out of the anniversary for Indianapolitans with a scandal that, in its sad and sordid way, offers a…

Excerpted from Eddie and the Gun Girl, a Kindle Single about the shooting of Eddie Waitkus, the real-life event that's best known as the fictional pivot of Bernard Malamud's The Natural. Annotations by the author appear throughout.

The owners insisted they had no plans to move the team. That's what the Maloofs swore, raising their right hand as their left hand worked deals with buyers first from Anaheim, then Virginia Beach, then Seattle. And that's what the owners of the Kansas City Kings maintained 30 years ago, even as they did everything in…

During a press conference today, Tennessee head coach Derek Dooley took a spin towards crazytown, comparing his team's miscommunication woes to the Nazis' prior to the Allies' landing at Normandy. This won't be hilariously recontextualized by a rival at all.

Tomorrow's Washington Post magazine unearths some letters from the Redskins archives to convey "the innocence of this long ago era" when a racist named George Preston Marshall married an actress (pictured) who convinced him to move his football team south.